Climate Collapse Is The Logical Result Of Colonialism

You can’t take and take from people and the planet forever

Untitled II by Hanusha Somasundaram — ‘By taking the definitive figure of a Sigiri Apsara and juxtaposing it with the image of a tea plucker, perhaps her own mother, Hanusha transcends the bridge between personal memory and public history. ‘Much attention is paid to a group of inanimate women on a rock face while living, breathing women whose sweat and tears prop up our economy, are ignored.’’

In Sri Lanka, we proudly display tea plantations and tea pluckers on tourism posters. The whole thing is a crime scene. The British uprooted both ecosystems and Indian Tamils to plant and pluck tea. This was the entire premise of colonialism. Take from the land and the people and make money.

A tea plantation is a monocrop, it’s an ecological abomination, and tea pluckers still live in the deepest poverty. The fact that they’re still going also shows you that colonialism never ended, it just became capitalism. White people still make money from southern resources like tea, coffee, uranium, gold, lithium, and oil. They still have privileged access to our countries as tourists while we sweat in visa lines to go the other way. And we’re still supposed to be grateful for this; it’s ‘development’, the new white word for ‘civilizing’. It’s all an atrocity and it’s ongoing.

The central logic of colonialism is to exploit the planet and it’s people, and if you take this to its logical conclusion it ends in climate and species collapse. There is no other way. People have always said this and it was always coming some day. This, unfortunately, is that day.